Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Server

#RealWomenOfVirtualInfrastructure

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I just was informed about a very cool initiative that will take place next Wednesday (29th) at VMworld:

I think it is great that there are so many smart talented women working for VMware with a huge passion for virtualization / cloud. I encourage everyone to visit the VMware booth on Wednesday at VMworld, but especially female attendees to meet their colleagues, (I was told between 10 and noon) and have a chat about cloud, virtualization, networking / storage etc!

 

Introducing SimpliVity, a new storage / compute platform

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Around VMworld many new companies are “born”… well most of them have been around for a while, but fact is that they go public around VMworld. With SimpliVity it is no different. SimpliVity is a new storage company, although “storage” might be understating what they actually do.

I had an intro to SimpliVity last week, and yesterday SimpliVity publicly announced their product the OmniCube. The OmniCube is a 2U unit which combines Compute and Storage resources in a single node combining SATA and SSD drives.

Yes I can hear you thinking aahhhh another Nutanix-alike solution… well not really and I will explain why in the upcoming paragraphs. I guess the biggest difference from a physical perspective is that this is not a multi-node 2U unit like Nutanix is. This is a single node 2U unit, it can hold a max of 768GB of memory but comes with 128GB by default. It holds two 6 core 2.5Ghz intel procs and 2 x 10Gbe and 2 x 1Gbe. From a storage perspective it comes with 4 x 200GB SSD and 8 x 3TB SATA drives. With deduplication and compression, usable capacity is around 20TB. This was calculated using conservative estimates for deduplication (1.5:1) and compression (1.5:1). Depending on the use case this is more than likely a lot higher. Yes the OmniCube is a beast.

But SimpliVity / OmniCube is not about hardware, SimpliVity in my opinion is really about the solution. SimpliVity took a VM centric approach, or should we say VM aware (Not unlike Tintri). All operations / policies are on a per VM basis. So if you want to enable replication, this will be on a per VM basis. Not just replication but they have added a whole bunch of other cool features like:

  • Global management
  • Snapshots
  • Deduplication / Compression (global!)
  • Cloud Integration

The cool thing of course that these features can be combined. Having your snapshots deduplicated will have an impact on the amount of data stored. Only replicating deduplicated and compressed blocks will lower your bandwidth requirements… and that especially comes in handy when you are replicating / storing data in a cloud environment as the dedupe / compression is on a global basis.

Combine all of that with a tight VMware vSphere integration and I believe we have a very interesting solution on our hands. Now I know some of you are skeptical about these new companies popping up, and I can also be skeptical but a quick search on linkedin reveals where these guys are coming from… and with most of their engineers having a strong storage and virtualization background you know they will be on top of their game.

Simplivity has a booth at VMworld, for anyone interested in new compute/storage architectures definitely recommended to stop by, or register for their session:

SPO3287 – Everybody Wants to Rule the World. 5 Steps to Successfully Building and Ruling a Virtual Infrastructure Empire

Cormac also posted a nice article on this topic, make sure to read it!

The first rule of #NotSupported is…..

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You might have seen Alan Renouf’s blog post on this… for the very first time we will have #notsupported sessions at VMworld. This is the brainchild of Randy Keener aka @vmrandy.

These lightning sessions (15 minute max) are all about the fun stuff you can do with vSphere / vCloud / SRM, note that almost everything discussed at these sessions is totally unsupported… but nevertheless very cool to try out or mess around with right. What can you expect?

  • Nested ESXi to the extreme!
  • (ab)using the Site Recovery Manager storage replication adaptors (SRA)
  • Affinity Rules on Site Recovery Manager shadow VMs..

Where is it?

Check out the Community Lounge at VMworld, the sessions will be hosted from 1pm – 3pm each day, for a schedule of the sessions visit this link below – make sure you add them to your calendars as you wont want to miss them, believe me! – More information will be added with the run up to VMworld. For those who can’t wait… here is the list for all the sessions: #NotSupported Session List

CloudPhysics #VMworld challenge, win a Mac Pro/Air or Google Nexus

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CloudPhysics just launched their website and with it a beta version of their product. As a great incentive to get people started with their product they came up with a contest where you can earn points by describing your virtualization problems. You can win some nice prices (retina Mac Pro, Google Nexus 7, Mac Air), so make sure to get started soon.

Your score is a calculation of the number of Cards you propose, plus a sum of the amount of activity you spend in the CloudPhysics portal. To achieve the best possible score, be sure to install a CloudPhysics Observer vApp, propose several new cards, vote on cards, and try out all the features of the portal. The greater the amount of activity and engagement, the higher your score can grow.

If you want to get started, go over to app.cloudphysics.com/login and login. Make sure to download the appliance! Now when you have downloaded it and got it up and running you should see data coming in soon. But where you really start collecting points is when you  start suggesting Cards. Look at the Card below, this is where you can start making suggestions, just hover over the lower right of the card to get in to the system…

Each of your suggestions will result in points. On top of that you also get points awarded for using their appliance  and commenting on suggestions from other users. A simple, but very cool challenge. The cool thing about this challenge is that these suggestions could  make it in to the product. In other words, if there is a problem you have faced many times and would like to prevent others from hitting the same thing… Report it and challenge the CloudPhysics people to make it part of their offering!

Current top-3 (after the first day):

  1. Jake Robinson
  2. William Lam
  3. Alan Renouf

Surely you can beat these 3 guys and collect your price at #VMworld. Go for it 🙂

I set restart priorities but still my VMs seem to be powered on in a different order!

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On the VMware Community someone asked this question about restart priorities. At the same time I received a question on a similar topic via email. This particular question was as follows:

I have restart priorities defined on my cluster. However even if I place my virtual machines for which this order applies on one host and test a failure they seem to come online in the wrong order…

In vSphere HA you can define the restart priority for each individual virtual machine. Now this restart priority applies to the power-on task that is initiated by HA when a host has failed. Did you note that I emphasized power-0n attempt? Well there is a reason for that… it is the prioritization of the attempt itself. HA doesn’t wait for a virtual machine to power-on before it starts the next… it just does the power-on attempt and when it completes the next round will be attempted. This also means that if you use 3 different priorities it could happen that a “low priority” virtual machine is restarted literally seconds after a “high priority” virtual machine is. In the case of the person who asked the question he had a large database machine defined as “high priority” and an app as “low priority”. Unfortunately the database machine took minutes to power-on and report up, where the application took less than a minute.

Keep that in mind when defining the restart priorities for your virtual machine. Yes it will help, but only for prioritizing which virtual machine needs to be restarted first. This is not a guarantee your virtual machines will be completed booted up first,